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Completed registration form must be returned to the Advisory Inspectorate of the Education Department, 12th floor, Wu Chung House, 213 Queen's Road East, Wan Chai by post or by fax: 2573 2805 on or before Saturday, February 1.

For enquiries, please call 2892 6541, 2892 6543 and 2892 6546.

End

Royal Observatory awards its best weather announcers

Two Royal Observatory staff recently received awards for being the best "Dial- a-Weather" announcers in the department.

They are Ms Chan Man-yee and Mr Ho Ka-hon for announcements in English and Cantonese respectively.

The awards are funded by the Government "Serving the Community" scheme.

Both Ms Chan and Mr Ho feel very much encouraged by the awards. They feel they are doing a useful job because their voices (and those of their colleagues) are now routinely heard by more than 60,000 callers every day.

"I feel very close to the people she serves whenever she makes recordings for Dial-a-Weather," said Ms Chan.

"For example, parents could decide what their young children should put on after getting temperature readings from the service."

Mr Ho remarked that converting weather bulletin written in Chinese into an announcement in colloquial Cantonese required some skills and was not easy at all.

Dial-a-Weather is a service whereby members of the public could call the Observatory to listen to tape recordings of current readings and weather forecasts.

In 1996, the Royal Observatory's Dial-a-Weather service handled a total of over 23 million calls, making it probably the most used hot-line service in Government. The figure reflects a 50-fold increase since the service began 10 years ago.